Artifice of Power Update # 11

Well, I’m getting bad at scheduling the updates the night before, but I was prioritizing my writing over my updates. I hit just under 8,000 words last week, which puts me at 91k words written since April. I’m also fast approaching the mid-point of the book, where I think I’m going to have some really interesting twists. If my discovery-writer brain complies. Notable writing events from this week:

My total word count in the book so far is 80,874, putting my at 47.5% toward my 170k word expectation. As I’ve said before, this is likely a bit longer than the book I actually want to release, but I did update my expected word count to reflect what it looked like I was going to end up with in the first draft. Also, this is still on track for a finished draft at the end of SeptemberI’m starting to introduce some world building elements that were hinted at in book one but were significantly less explicit. I’m interested to see what early feedback groups say about that, since I have a few concerns about tonal whiplash between books. But personally, I don’t think there’s a concern and I’m excited to include more of the fantastical in my fantasy seriesArkaen has a real problem to address beyond “There’s some dude up here messing things up”, which is going to let him become a lot more active. That’s going to be funNiamsha is still a source of issues, but I think she’s just going to require a lot of serious editing to have the sort of arc she really needs. But she didn’t leave me completely blocked this time…hopefully. I haven’t finished her most recent chapter yet!General publishing plans

So I’ve started talking about my publishing plans for next year, and in working toward the goal of making a sustainable release schedule so this series gets the attention it deserves, I’ve enrolled in a six-week self-publishing planning course. That means I may start doing things I haven’t before (i.e., finally getting my newsletter off the ground). I hope everyone will support me with this, as my main goal is to build a stronger audience of people who genuinely enjoy my books. If something I start comes off as gimmicky and a turn off, bear with me a bit. Writing a series is tough, and doing so without much of an audience can be pretty demoralizing. I won’t sacrifice quality or my vision for the stories for a better marketing plug, but a bigger audience is better motivation… and makes paying the costs of publishing easier. See you all next time!